


Mycelial Networks

by isoscele



Category: Lumberjanes
Genre: F/F, Healing, Lesbians Who Yearn, u ever carve the names of you and your gf into a tree to combat the incomprehensible passing of time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-22
Updated: 2019-09-22
Packaged: 2020-10-25 21:48:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20731283
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/isoscele/pseuds/isoscele
Summary: Molly, in the process of becoming a person more deserving of the forest she loves, finds something she thought she'd lost.And then another. And another.





	Mycelial Networks

**Author's Note:**

> It's almost 4 am.

Molly’s favorite thing that she learned about trees, back in eighth grade, was that forest systems had interconnected root systems and could communicate across miles and miles. That was back when she spent every second period in Ms. Garon’s science class tapping out Morse-code messages to the girl with the rainbow sneakers across the aisle- _ I like your hair, do you want to hear a joke, do you know my name? _ She thought there had to be some way to manage it in people, too- a way to make all the talking easier. To say what she wanted to. She thought, while drawing birds’ nests in the margins of her notes, _ I wish I had a family, _and then felt embarrassed because she already had a family, she knew that.

To draw a birds’ nest, you make a lot of short little lines that lock together, and you nestle it as far into the V of branches as you can. It’s always two eggs, because she doesn’t know how to fit more in there. She let them crawl up the page and into where the header should be. She looked at girls in her classes- Georgia, with the orange headband, Alyssa always sleeping in social studies- and added more. 

Molly’s second favorite thing that she learned about trees was that they were forever. She’d always liked things that had the capacity to last.

* * *

Molly tripped over a root. This wasn’t uncommon; Nellie could navigate the forest half-blind and spun around several times, but Molly was easily-distractible and not particularly graceful. She sprawled, hands-first, into the dirt in a terrific explosion of pine needles and had to lie there grouchily for several seconds. 

She looked up just in time to see the bird she’d been following- almost translucent, but with the rainbow sheen of a patch of oil on the side of the road- squawk mockingly and fly away.

Molly was now soggy, had what felt like half a tree’s worth of pine needles in her mouth, and had lost her mark. The day had already lasted quite literally two weeks, but was beginning to take a turn for the worse.

She flipped over onto her hands and knees, and scanned the trail until she caught sight of a tiny, reddish squirrel with what looked like a jeweled caterpillar in its mouth.

“Sorry to bother you,” Molly said, trying to suppress the urge to wipe her hands on her shorts; she had company, after all. “Could you tell Nellie that I’ll be a little later than planned?”

The squirrel eyed her, bit the head off of the caterpillar, and scampered off.

Molly sat up and pushed the hair out of her face. She hadn’t earned the respect Nellie was allotted by the beings of the forest, but she thought they were starting to view her as a more permanent fixture, and something to be humored when possible. They were getting used to having her around. 

She didn’t know all the rules of this place yet, but all of them allowed her to be here. That was a miracle. She didn’t need anything else.

Still, she wanted to preserve her dignity when she could, so she grasped at the side of the tree she was leaning against, hauled herself to her feet, swayed for an alarming second where she couldn’t recall if she or Nellie had remembered to eat today, and then caught herself on the adjacent trunk.

Her fingers curled around a deep groove in the bark- several of them, twined together- and she froze.

* * *

_I__t’s almost noon and as hot as it ever gets and Molly’s been walking for what feels like miles, so she almost cries with relief when she finds Mal again. _

_ “Good news,” she says. “The manticore’s willing to show us the way out.” _

_ Mal looks up and the look on her face is almost too much for Molly to take, yet again- it’s not relief, or excitement, just pure contentment at seeing Molly approaching. “And the bad news in three, two-.” _

_ “Bad news,” Molly says. “He’ll only do it for a game of poker.” _

_ Mal tilts her head slightly. Her fingers are tapping a bass line against the rock under her heel- something Molly doesn’t know but might get to hear, one of these nights, on an iPod borrowed from a yeti or stolen from Rosie’s cabin. “I always did okay against my uncles. Does he have a deck of cards?” _

_ Molly makes a face, and Mal laughs. “They never think it through, do they?” _

_ The idea that they weren’t carrying their own personal pack of cards had seemingly thrown the manticore; he would need a few minutes to think it over. For now, they’re about as lost as Molly ever gets, anymore. _

_ “I’m cool to stay for a bit,” Mal says. “Hey, I think this is the tree where we hatched the three-headed snake.” _

_ Molly squints at the base. It does look like the sort of place she would choose to hatch a three-headed snake, but- “I’m not sure.” _

_ “Hard to keep track,” Mal agrees amiably, and then. “Uh- I was thinking, if we’re lost, we should keep a sort of marker.” _

_ “Oh?” Molly says, and Mal is already pulling out her pocketknife. _

_ “Just a little thing,” she’s saying, “to help us get back,” and Molly doesn’t know what she’s feeling because she was never very good at those kinds of words, but she’s pretty sure it’s good, she’s pretty sure things are exactly the way they should be and soon the manticore will return and say that he guesses he could settle for a riddle under these extenuating circumstances but right now even the crickets are quiet and Mal’s right hand is steady and her left is reaching, slowly, towards Molly’s. _

* * *

MAL + MOL.

They’d never found it again. They’d looked for days- _ I coulda sworn it was here, maybe on the other side? no, no, let’s not leave yet, I don’t want it to end, what if I never get it back- _but it had disappeared. 

Molly traced the clumsy heart encircling their names and felt an absurd pang of nostalgia. Things were good here, better than good. It felt like a betrayal to miss any part of the way things had been when she was fourteen. 

Still, Mal with the knife, laughing as it slipped and trembled, clicking the handle forward and back with a _ chhk _noise that Molly would always remember, forgoing the two extra letters of Molly’s name because her wrist was cramping up- there was a lot to miss in that moment. Maybe that was okay. Maybe Molly’s life was going to be so good from here on out that she didn’t even need to save the missing for bad days. Maybe she was out of bad days- had used so many when she was twelve and thirteen and fifteen and stuffing a pillow across her ears to block out all the noise in her head, and simply had none left. She woke up ever day under a sun that set with no apparent pattern, and her entire world smelled like campfire-smoke and sap, and maybe she even deserved it. 

Molly stood up straighter and looked around. The squirrel was long gone, with about a thirty percent chance of passing on her message. She was in a grove she didn’t recognize. She couldn’t hear water, or birds, or the screeches of the Steamrollin’ Sasquatches as they wrapped up their midday roller derby, which narrowed it down, but she was so far from ever understanding this place. She had no idea. 

She walked further into the grove. There was kind of a clearing here, with a neat little pocket of sun. The trees looked weird, though- not supernatural-weird, but they all looked different. There didn’t seem to be any uniformity among them. 

Pride swelled in her chest at the thought. “Yeah,” she said to the nearest one, which was almost bald of branches and rose at least twenty feet taller than the ones on either side of it. “Same here."

She knew what she was going to see before she did- right where she had left it, in the armpit of the lowest branch, still as stark and fresh as the day she had cut it. 

* * *

_“We lost the last one,” she explains, knees already the color of freshly-mown grass, jackknife borrowed from Jen resting against her index finger like a pencil. “I thought we’d give it another shot.”_

_ “Was there really a secret passage to the lighthouse, or did you make it up to get me out here?” Mal asks, but she’s bending down too, excavating the papery bark with her fingers as if searching for the perfect place to gouge. _

_ Molly chooses not to answer, instead pressing the blade into the tree until it leaves a mark. A short thrill cuts through her at making something so stark, so visible. At leaving something of herself in a place like this, a place so good she shouldn’t even be allowed to align herself with it. _

* * *

That one had been M + M, which caused Mal to say that she preferred Skittles, which informally led to the Candy Brackets a few days later, with Ripley melting Twizzlers above the campfire and accidentally attracting a djinn with an inconveniently sweet tooth. And Molly had said _ Skittles, really? _ because she couldn’t imagine choosing anything over chocolate and Mal had looked at the clumsy, misshapen letters and said _ well they all have their charms. _

They never found that tree either, now that Molly thought about it. Even when they stumbled across the same patch of omnivorous lichen and it should have been just a few feet away, they hadn’t found it.

Molly used to think it meant that the forest hated them for what they did to it. Now she thought it was a little like how when she was a kid and hoarded her Valentines, even the ones she found trampled on the floor after school, just to see the array of hearts every time she opened her sock drawer. It wasn’t at all like that, of course, but she recognized the urge to keep a piece of something soft, just for yourself. 

Molly stood in the center of the mismatched grove of trees, and it occurred to her that they weren’t really mismatched at all. The one across from her said MAL/MOLLY with an awkward, half-finished star right next to it, and the one beside that was MALLY- 

_they don't know if they've lost the giant scorpion yet but Mal has her knife out and at the ready and the adrenaline makes Molly want to do something really stupid, like lean forward, so she gestures to the tree and says-_

MY + MC

_-another shot? and Mal just-_

MOLLY AND MAL (AND RIPLEY!). 

_-laughs, says "perfect," dusts the mulch from her jeans-_

MAL MOLLY 4EVER.

_-this one'll stay this time, we'll look for it tomorrow. _

But they were never where Molly left them. 

There was something about youth that stuck to the skin of everything around you. Molly let her forehead hit the trunk of the nearest one (MOLLYMAL) with a _ thunk. _It smelled like scat and pine and the apples she used to bring on hikes, wrapped in Mal’s flannel so they wouldn’t bruise. There were some things in the world that never let go and maybe she could be one of them. Some things that didn’t have to leave, that had time, that had something better than a summer. 

They must have carved up fifteen trees over those few endless, sticky, incredible months. They were right here all along, communicating through their roots and the remnants stitched across their faces. 

Molly looked up at the sound of footprints, heavier than any little old lady had any right making. Nellie was leaning against her gnarled walking stick and her face was crabbed in something not unlike pleasure. Molly had seen Nellie proud and satisfied and even a little excited, but not soft. Not gentle.

“I didn’t know,” Molly said. It seemed wholly insufficient. 

Nellie just looked at her and suddenly Molly could _ feel _the circle shift, expand under her feet. She could see more trees now, maybe always there but just outside her notice. She was getting better at that, the noticing. 

One of them was A + R, with a Cupid arrow. Another was N/F, and there were more, going back as far as Molly could see, bending around the hills and easily tacking onto the rocks.

“Foolish to think it,” Nellie said, in a tone that brokered no argument. “Love doesn’t up and walk away.”

* * *

Molly slipped, again, on the damp ribbon of road unwinding from the mouth of the river. She almost face-planted onto the asphalt, but caught herself against the slickened payphone. The little glass panel creaked open with a deep sigh.

Molly inserted two gold drachmae and dialed a number she had memorized on a too-long car ride that didn’t bear thinking about. The dialtone buzzed, and she held her breath.

“Hey,” Mal said as soon as she picked up. “I saw a weird-ass pigeon that reminded me of you.”

Molly laughed and leaned forward, instinctively, as if to pick up more of what Mal was putting out, what she had always thrown into the world. “Tell me more.”

And Mal did- the pigeon, and the chips she had fed it, and the last three gigs and the incompetent soundboy who didn’t hold a candle to what April could do under thirty feet of water, and how she wrote songs exclusively at the gas station down the street these days, buzzed on energy drinks and the tingly feeling fluorescent lighting gave her. She talked about the lost sphinxlet she’d encountered on East and 33rd, and how she’d smuggled it onto the subway in a reusable grocery bag to help it get home. She asked about Molly’s latest adventures, and Molly talked about merpeople and yetis and unicorns and birds that walked on air and lizards that ran, haltingly, across water, and the dragonflies that fattened themselves on birdsong. 

She caught her breath after several minutes and then, against the side of the receiver, tapped _ I love you _in Morse code.

“Hey, Mol?” Mal said, static and sound from a thousand miles away. “I love you.”

For a moment, Molly was overcome. She leaned all the way against the phone and opened her mouth, soundless, like a wish-fish on the edges of the bank. _ She heard, _ she thought, wildly. _ She heard me. _

“Oh,” she managed.

“I bet you say that to all the girls,” Mal teased, and Molly had to blink away the burning in her eyes.

_ I did it, _ she wanted to say. _ I did it, Mal, I have roots now, I can talk without talking and love someone who knows me like you do and I can go so high in the trees we weren’t ever sure enough to climb and I can see the whole world exactly the way we made it. _

“Just you,” she said, “it’s just you.” 


End file.
